Prior art artificial impedance surface antennas (AISAs) are described by D. Gregoire and J. Colburn, “Artificial impedance surface antenna design and simulation”, Proc. 2010 Antenna Applications Symposium, pp. 288, J. S. Colburn et al., “Scalar and Tensor Artificial Impedance Surface Conformal Antennas”, 2007 Antenna Applications Symposium, pp. 526-540, and B. H. Fong et al, “Scalar and Tensor Holographic Artificial Impedance Surfaces”, IEEE Trans. Antennas Propag., accepted for publication, 2010.
In the prior art, AISAs are fabricated by printing arrays of metallic patches 26 onto a dielectric substrate, as shown in FIG. 1B. The surface-wave impedance modulation is created by the printed grid of metallic patches, whose size varies according to the desired modulation. To operate properly it is critical that the size and placement of metallic patches maintain a strict dimensional tolerance. The dielectric substrate, upon which the metallic patches in the prior art are printed, is typically a high-cost, a high-frequency circuit board material such as Rogers 3010 which costs typically $150/sq. ft. The process of creating the array of square patches requires costly and time-consuming circuit board etching techniques.
What is needed are lower cost artificial impedance surface antennas (AISAs) and a method of fabricating the AISAs that use conventional manufacturing methods to allow for mass production. The embodiments of the present disclosure answer these and other needs.